addresses (1)

I’m reading Jane Clifton’s The address book. It’s a memoir about all 32 houses she’s lived in since her birth in Gibraltar in 1949. She embarks on this journey after hearing Clive James remark that: “We carry with us the sensory impression of every house we ever lived in.”

She contends, conversely, that we leave a sensory layer in each house we inhabit, like the flakes of human skin and hair we leave behind as dust, the walls “stained with our breath, our farts, our coughs and sneezes … walls [that] have witnessed our most intimate secrets … heard our moans of love, seen our tears of frustration … ”

I count the places I have lived in. I cannot match Clifton’s 32, but 27 is good for a bloke only two years her junior lacking a father in the military posted all over the globe.

Life for me begins at 14 McConnell Street in Warrnambool before moving to 44 Nicholson Street. Returning to Melbourne, we occupy my father’s parents’ house at 551 Heidelberg Road, Alphington, for three months while they buy trinkets in the Orient.

While looking for a house to buy we rent 31 Marston Street, Bentleigh. I am now eight years old. The place I think of as the home I grew up in is at 265 Grange Road, Ormond. We refer to it simply as Two Sixty-five.

The numbers of all those early houses are indelibly imprinted on my psyche; later numbers have been deleted from memory’s hard-drive.

My first year home away from home is the Caulfield Grammar boarding-house at 217 Glen Eira Road in St Kilda East as a ‘resident master’ while studying to be a teacher. Then comes a rash of share-houses: 34 Kendall Street, Ringwood, and Bemboka Road, Warranwood, the first house whose number is gone. So too is the house.

Now I am a teacher in country Victoria, sharing with other teachers at Golden Point, Elphinstone and Childers at Dr Danger’s place, where my son is conceived, but another house that is no more. The addresses are roadside delivery or mailbox, RSD or RMB.

I migrate with a pregnant woman to Littlehampton in South Australia to do a bit of communal living on the now-bypassed highway to Melbourne. Women fight over who will cook porridge and we leave. My son is born at home at 11 Pine Grove, Belair, overlooking the lights of Adelaide. Immediately we decamp for country Victoria, to a house called Mayfield on an unnamed road at Greta.

Doctor Will’s house at Eldorado is where my daughter is born, McGregors Road, another RMB. A year later we take our children to Tasmania where the marriage comes unstuck in The Convent at Lymington and at Petcheys Bay on the Huon estuary. Road names and numbers mean nothing.

I tumble from my motorbike and smash my shoulder. The children and their mother stay in Tasmania and I return to Victoria to convalesce in a caravan in my parents’ driveway at Menzies Creek. I have lost my children, their mother, a place to live and a job. I have no wheels: I am going nowhere. Life can only get better.

  

Rock on.